Suicide Psalms is both hymn and visceral scream—of loss, despair, hope and ultimately redemption. These poems are drawn out with quick precision, as if they were indeed written in haste, or delirium, before tightening the noose or firing the pistol or jumping off the ledge.
Praise for Suicide Psalms:
“And so it is that those friends who have lived close to suicide become the prophets who might lead us through the gathering darkness of our despairing ecocidal age—into more honourable, tender, sustainable ways of living together on this groaning, delicate, crying earth. `That something better rises out of the ashes.’ This is Rowley at her heart stammering, howling, apocalyptic, playful, musical best.” — Di Brandt
“The poems of Mari-Lou Rowley’s Suicide Psalms are deft, double-edged, `kill sites bedded with violets,’ songs of violent beauty. Scalene: the constantly shifting, sharpening edges and angles (no two sides ever the same) of Suicide Psalms’ three movements balance, ultimately, in a perfect complex structure. Dissonant; harmonic. Rowley’s poetry, as always, a snapping, synaptical singing, stinging electric. In the necessary, unpredictable climate of Suicide Psalms, `the wind fingers/all possible points of entry/conclusions/ways out.’ “ — Sylvia Legris
Eco-science poet and interdisciplinary scholar, Mari-Lou Rowley has published nine collections of poetry, most recently Unus Mundus (Anvil Press), which was nominated for three Saskatchewan Book Awards. Rowley’s poetry, essays and chapters have appeared internationally in literary, arts and science-related books and journals including Fractured Ecologies (Denmark), the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (US) and Aesthetica magazine’s (UK) Creative Works Competition. Multimedia work includes the videopoem Prairie Surreal (The Goose). Rowley is currently Editor of Grain magazine. She lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan where she is working on a poetic memoir and a novel.
